“Pat, you did something when you gave me that Power of Attorney. You gave me more right over the disposal of this place than if I were your husband. I came over here to use this right and sell Johnnywater. I think even James Blaine Hawkins will stop, look and listen when I tell him how come to-morrow.
“He’ll come back. A good, strong dose of sunlight will bring him back—on the rampage, I’m guessing—mad to think how scared he was when he left. I played a dirty trick on him, Pat. I made him think the psychic cat was a spook.
“He thought it all right! But you see, I didn’t know.
“I wonder if he really did see something. I think he did—or at any rate he kidded himself into thinking he did. I never dreamed he’d see.
“Pat, you called me flabby souled. That hurt—and it wasn’t my vanity you hit. I’ve wanted you to respect me, Pat, in spite of my profession. And when you flung that at me, I saw you didn’t understand. Lord knows I hate a whiner, and I won’t try to explain just why I called you unjust.
“But after I got over here, Pat, I began to see the way I must have looked to you. You took at face value all the slams you’ve heard about the movies. You lumped us all together and called us cheap and weak and vain. Just puppets strutting around before the camera like damned peacocks. You couldn’t see that maybe it takes quite as much character for a man to make good in the movies and live clean and honest, as it does to drive cows to water.
“But after all these hills and the desert out here beyond the cañon are mighty big and clean—my God, Pat, they’d shame the biggest man that ever lived! When you get out here and measure yourself alongside them you feel like a buffalo gnat on an elephant. And there’s things in this cañon it takes a man to meet.
“There’s mystery here; the kind you can’t put your finger on. The kind the movies can’t feature on the screen. Until James Blaine Hawkins drove into the scene, I’d have sworn a man could live here for forty years in the wilderness like the children of Israel—or maybe it was Noah and the ark—and never meet a villain who’s out to make you either the goat or a corpse—both, maybe, if the story runs that way.
“But I’ve learned something I never knew before. I’ve learned there are things a man can fight that’s worse than crooks. Dad was kind of religious, and he used to quote Bible at me. One of his favorite lines was about ‘He that is master of himself is greater than he that taketh a city.’ It sounded like the bunk to me when I was a kid. Now I kind of see what the old man was driving at. This country puts it right up to you, Pat.
“So, I’m going to find out something before I leave here, Pat. I want to know who’s going to lick: Gary Marshall, or Johnnywater Cañon. It sort of dawned on me gradually that if I leave here now, I’ll leave here licked. Licked by something that’s never laid a finger on me! Scared out—like Waddell. Pat, my dear, I never could go back and face you if I had that to remember. Every time you looked at me I’d feel that you were calling me flabby souled in your heart—and I’d know I had it coming.